Political art by painter Kaya Mar

There is a statiscal possibility that there are some people in the UK who may have accidentally locked themselves in an old chest freezer on their local land-fill site, or who may have been stranded on a barren rock in the Northern Atlantic Ocean 150 miles west of the Shetland Islands following a harrowing stag party, who are still blissfully unaware of the looming national referendum on Britain’s continuing membership of the European Union on June 23rd which has been the subject of the most acrimonious, bitter, divisive political campaigning that Britain has witnessed since 1973, when we voted to join the EU.

The referendum was given the go-ahead by a beleagured David Cameron following the 2015 General Election to honour a desperate electoral bribe offered before the election to stop the Conservative vote haemorraging further as thousands of traditional Conservative voters jumped ship in 2014-2015 to join the right-wing populist UK Independence Party (UKIP) which was created in 1991 with the sole intention of taking Britain out of the EU.

Political artist Kaya Mar is pictured in front of Parliament with his painting portraying UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage, standing naked in a huge glass of beer.

Led since 1993 by charismatic bar-fly Nigel Farage who campaigned exhaustively on an often borderline racist fearmongering anti-immigration platform, UKIP’s membership had sky-rocketed since 2013, and in the two Local Government Elections prior to the 2015 General Election an energised UKIP won a shockingly high number of local council victories. Suddenly there were 497 UKIP councillors in office up and down the country – predominantly at the expense of ousted incumbent Conservative councillors. Farage’s aggressively Euro-sceptic party was already the dominant British contingent in the European Parliament, providing 11 out of a total 24 British MEP’s.

At Conservative Party Headquarters massive existential panic ensued, and David Cameron had a massive UKIP problem to deal with. His position as leader of the Conservative Party was on the line. Something had to be done to save his skin.

Farage seemed to be unassailable. His meticulously crafted plain-speaking “Man of the people” persona was expertly aimed at his target demographic – disaffected, powerless working and middle-class voters from across the political spectrum who had seen their wages and standards of living drop and drop since the Tories had taken power in 2010 and imposed their punitive “Austerity” ideology on a nation already weakened by the financial crash of 2008, and who were readily persuaded by the charismatic Farage that the source of all their troubles was (and always had been, and always would be) an interfering, unaccountable, bloated European Union dictated to by bloody Germans, and the free-flow of hordes of swarthy EU citizens allowed to enter Britain to work and live which had, Farage preached, seen unskilled economic migrants “pouring in” from Europe’s poorest countries, flooding our labour market, taking our jobs and driving down wages because they were willing to work for less money in this Land of Milk and Honey than any self-respecting British worker would.

Relentlessly tapping in to the darkest reaches of the insular British psyche, Farage’s lurid Enoch Powellian speeches threatened that, for example, the first day that newcomer Romania became an EU member there would quite literally be a tsunami of 17 million eligible, desperate, devious Roma gypsies heading to Britain to live off state benefits and be immediately given free council housing. Farage’s fear-laden racist rhetoric appealed massively to those on the far-right and, increasingly, the Tory base. UKIP was already littered with former British National Party and National Front members, and Farage knew that if he could clean up UKIP’s tarnished image enough he could convince disaffected Euro-sceptic Conservative voters to the UKIP cause.

Political artist Kaya Mar visited Rochester, Kent, with three satirical paintings of David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage one day prior to a bye-election hotly contested by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) which saw Conservative defector Mark Reckless gain the Parliamentary seat.

Following the attention-grabbing defection of two Conservative MPs to UKIP which triggered Bye-elections and produced UKIP victories for Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless – on the promise by Nigel Farage that if the public voted for UKIP in the General Election he would demand an EU referendum – Farage’s star was in the ascendant.

Europhile David Cameron and his strategists had no choice but to match Farage’s referendum promise to his own restive, dwindling Conservative Party membership. Cameron promised in his election manifesto that if he won the election Britain would have its referendum, and by doing so was successful in beating off the UKIP threat in the 2015 General Election. Mark Reckless lost in Rochester and Strood, leaving UKIP with the solitary Douglas Carswell in Clacton. Even though UKIP polled a massive 13% of the total votes cast nationally, sensationally, party leader Nigel Farage failed to win his contested seat in South Thanet and the Conservatives squeezed home to victory – but with a reduced majority.

David Cameron then embarked on a high profile PR campaign to try and renegotiate various elements of Britains obligations as EU members to further placate his increasingly stroppy Euro-sceptic MPs and the party’s influential financial backers. He made several visits to Brussels where he pitched his list of hissy-fit reform demands, trying to win over the powerful German Chancellor Angela Merckel and French President Francois Hollande with the repeated threat that Britain would leave if he didn’t get these concessions. Cameron failed miserably. There were key issues absolutely central to the core philosophy of the European Union which were not up for negotiation, like the free movement of labour across internal EU borders, adherence to the Human Rights Act, acceptance of rulings from the European Court of Human Rights and the level of Britain’s annual contribution to EU coffers.

Like the pathological PR man that he is, David Cameron returned home claiming that he had won some important concessions on European Reform, but the truth was that though he had managed to score some minor victories, he had succeeded in alienating the political allies that mattered in Europe, and had been told in no uncertain terms that he had squandered all his political capital in Brussels and everyone was tired of his whingeing. Cameron was losing influence rapidly and becoming side-lined in Europe, and his future as Conservative leader was whispered to be on shaky ground.

Back in London the 43 year long festering tribal divisions within the Conservative Party between pro and vehemently anti-European Union MPs opened up like fault lines across colliding tectonic plates, and so a date for the referendum was announced and a Referendum Bill passed in Parliament. There was to be state funding for both official “In” and “Out” campaigns and, rather than demand that his Cabinet Ministers observe collective responsibility to the Government’s official pro-EU membership position which would force Cameron to sack dissenting Ministers, or see them resign in a flurry of damaging press attention, Cameron had no option but to suspend collective responsibility and give his Ministers permission to campaign publicly for the “No” (or “Brexit” – British Exit) position if they wished.

By now it was estimated that 50% of his MPs wanted Brexit. The fight was on.

After a power struggle between three rival Brexit campaign groups to become the official, richly-funded “Out” campaign, the matter was finally settled and the keys to the petty cash tin were handed to “Vote Leave”, on whose campaign committee sits (amongst others) Michael Gove MP, Iain Duncan Smith MP, Chris Grayling MP, Liam Fox MP, Priti Patel MP, Daniel Hannan MP and Mayor of London Boris Johnson MP – a committee comprised (strangely enough) largely of power-hungry Conservative MPs who are all jockeying themselves into position to get themselves nominated in the inevitable party leadership challenge and blood-letting if the internally-unpopular Cameron’s “In” campaign fails – none more so than dilettante faux-buffoon Boris Johnson, whose trophy-hunting plans for getting Cameron’s crown are widely known.

Parallel (but now only self-funded) campaigns are being run by the obscure “Get Britain Out” group and Nigel Farage’s UKIP-centric “Grassroots Out (GO)” campaign, fronted by Farage, Tory MP Peter Bone and (to the confusion and disbelief of just about everyone) controversial former Respect Party MP George Galloway.

In no time at all the various In and Out campaigns started bombarding the nation with their passionately held beliefs, backed up by a hurricane of highly selective statistics, and dire predictions for the future of Britain if you didn’t vote for them.

Soon after the official campaigns were launched, US President Barak Obama flew to London to lend his support for David Cameron’s ‘Remain’ campaign, drawing howls of complaints of foul play and derision from the ‘Leave’ camp who, rather than listen to Obama’s official position that whilst it is a matter for the British public to decide, Washington believes that leaving the EU would be a strategic geo-political mistake which would weaken Britain’s standing in the world and might destabilise the EU, Boris Johnson penned a shocking response in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun Newspaper in which he accused the President of hypocrisy and then went on to imply that the “part-Kenyan President” harboured “an ancestral dislike of the British empire”.

President Obama greets David Cameron as Boris Johnson insults him.

The long weeks that followed have seen a bewildering succession of outright lies, unfounded exaggeration and the use of statistics so chronically manipulated to serve each campaign’s needs that the general public have been left completely bewildered and unable to discover (let alone understand) the crucial facts behind what has become a purely emotion-driven campaign as each side has forgone the professionalism expected of them and has chosen instead to rely on dog-whistle politics and highly emotive, divisive statements – none more so than on the issue of immigration, which has massively legitimised the bigoted, hysterical claims from the far-right and UKIP with their entrenched, insular “Little Englander” claims that the United Kingdom will implode any second beneath the sheer weight of millions of theoretical refugees and bloody immigrants if we don’t pull up the drawbridge immediately and close our borders to Johnny Foreigner.

The tragedy is that as June 23rd approaches and Britain is about to make the most important decision it has made in over four decades of mutual European prosperity and peace, we may be about to throw it all away on the basis of small-minded prejudice and fear of the Other…

Kaya stands in front of protesters with his painting “David Cameron – Crashing the UK Economy”

16th Apr 2016: An estimated 150,000 anti-austerity activists travelled the length and breadth of the country to march through Central London and protest against government austerity policies which are having serious impacts on public health, housing, employment, wages and education.

Organised by The People’s Assembly, the “March for Health, Homes, Jobs & Education” protesters (who used the Twitter hashtag #4Demands) represented junior doctors, nurses, NHS workers, teachers, students, firefighters, trade unionists, disability rights and welfare rights campaigners, local government employees and a wide cross section of aggrieved citizens who claim that they are being unjustly impoverished by an uncaring Conservative government which is purposefully dismantling public services and handing them to private capital to fund tax relief for the wealthiest.

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An extra post-Panama Papers data leak flavour prevailed at the protest with many people carrying “Dodgy Dave” placards – a reference to Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent painfully drawn-out admission over four days that he has personally benefitted from the use of offshore tax havens set up by his late father.

After a couple of hours of beach-ball throwing, speeches from activists and plenty of sloganeering the protesters dashed up the road to protest outside the nearby Grand Connaught Rooms where David Cameron was addressing the Conservative Party Spring Conference, and it was on the steps of the hotel where Kaya was photographed, brandishing his satirical painting of David Cameron as a monkey brandishing a paintbrush loaded by Conservative-Blue paint and artist’s palette as he paints a picture of the Three Wise Monkeys – symbolising the Mafia-like code of silence and willful blindness to wrong-doing by the rich, the powerful and the corrupt.

It was very rapidly pointed out that though Mossack Fonseca had created over 250,000 shell companies for clients with the sole intention of hiding money from tax collectors on behalf of their national governments, they were just one single company operating out of just one of more than 90 tax havens scattered around the World – the majority of them Crown Dependencies administered by Her Majesty’s Obedient Government on behalf of the City of London! The scale of the corruption is truly vast and almost beyond comprehension, and because of strict codes of secrecy it is impossible to see where all the money has gone and who has taken it.

The task ahead feels almost too big to engage, but the dialogue has begun now that people have a better idea of the scale of the problem, and the ICIJ have promised to release the entire database of so-called “Panama Papers” to the public as an online, searchable resource in the hope that this will eventually force tax havens to maintain registers of personal ownership of shell companies, and by so doing make it easier for governments to track down money siphoned out of their economies.

Meanwhile, in the real world, children with no hope and no future die by the thousand every day because they have no clean water or medicines to treat easily-treatable diseases…

Waving the flag of the European Union, lame duck Chancellor George Osborne perches tenuously on a ‘Brexit’ ballot box on unsettled, choppy waters, holding his red Budget Box which only contains an axe.

March 16th finally broke across our green and sceptered isles. It was a cold and miserable Winter morning as Kaya Mar, wrapped up warmly against the damp air, the comforting memory of the six Pop Tarts he had for breakfast quickly fading from his mind, trudged up Whitehall towards Downing Street clutching a large oil painting almost as big as him.

The dense uncaring grey clouds above his head blotted out any vestigal hope of sunshine and were only rivalled in their impersonal malice by thick, coiling plumes of carcinogenic diesel particulates belching from the wobbling super-heated rectums of passing red Boris Buses delivering herds of low-paygrade civil servants to their anonymous cubbyholes distributed all over the monolithic grey Portland Stone cliffs of Whitehall.

Today was Budget Day, and a jaded nation of destitute families on zero hour contracts was holding its collective breath in the almost child-like anticipation that this time… this time… we would all be gambolling ecstatically, bare-footed through verdant fields thick with the lush Green Shoots of Recovery which shiny-faced spiv Chancellor of the Exchequer the Right Honourable George Gideon Giles Osborne (Former towel-folder and multi-millionaire heir-apparent to the baronetcy of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon whosefamily mottoemblazoned on their heraldic crest is “Pax in bello” – Peace in war) had assured us all was just over the horizon – if only they weren’t all too weak and underachieving from eating food from the local foodbank which even the emaciated family dog won’t touch – to crawl over the next hill towards it.

After the politically humiliating climb-down that George Osborne had been forced to make at the end of 2015 by a rebellious House of Lords over his plans to cut Family Tax Credits for 800,000 poor, working families, there was an expectation – absurd in hindsight – that the Chancellor would finally have seen that his ideological obsession with dismantling the country’s Social Welfare security net was driving large swathes of the country into poverty and homelessness. Maybe this Budget would see a glimmer of hope for millions. Maybe this time… Maybe pigs will fly…

Photo: Paul Marriot (via Twitter)

Taking up his position outside the ominous, heavily guarded entrance to Downing Street with his new painting (which portrays Osborne as a lame duck Chancellor perched tenuously on a ‘Brexit‘ ballot box on unsettled, choppy waters, holding his red Budget Box which only contains an axe and waving the flag of the European Union), Kaya nodded as a slight, familiar greeting to the armed police officers peering through the bars of the huge black gates, and he noticed satisfyingly, that none of them yet were wearing privatised G4S uniforms, and comfortingly, they still clutched Heckler and Koch semi-automatic machine guns and not the refurbished World War I Lee-Enfield rifles with fixed bayonet favoured by cost-conscious Serco Services.

Before long, photographers from the international press agencies arrived, looking for anything to add a spark of interest to the press’ obligatory Budget Day coverage. They fluttered around Kaya and his colourful painting, chuckling, nodding in agreement as they understood the painting’s symbolism and clicking away with their behemoth cameras before rushing off in search of a bit of free Wi-Fi in a nearby nationally-franchised coffee shop (whose parent company is registered in the British Virgin islands so they don’t have to pay tax on their UK earnings) from where they could send the photos off to their picture agencies. The actual Budget wouldn’t be announced for several hours yet, and everybody wants to get some photos in early in hope of sales on a big domestic news day.

As the photographers sipped their tepid coffed-flavoured milk and munched on their increasingly-shrinking raisin croissants they tapped away furiously on their laptops, occasionally looking around suspiciously at their competitors and wondered “Which one of us will get that single photo that will go round the World? Will it be me this time? Little Timmy needs new shoes and we haven’t eaten meat for a month…”

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Meanwhile, his objective achieved, Kaya made his way back to the leafy suburbs, getting home just in time for the live coverage of the Chancellor’s statement in the packed House of Commons. Settling down on the welcoming sofa with his lunch – a lump of slightly stale bread and a small block of Morrison’s “I-Can’t-Believe-You-Think-This-Is-Actually-Cheese” – he stared at the screen in disbelief as Osborne – grinning like a Bonobo that had just discovered it’s own genitals – announced his political tour de force: a tax on sugary soft drinks to be introduced in 2 years time, the cost of which can be passed on to the public.

Kaya sighed and pointed the remote control at the TV and switched it off. It was all so pointless trying to understand Osborne’s slippery twists and turns, and his lunch was making him feel sleepy as he sunk back into the welcoming embrace of the chair. He would just have to wait until tomorrow and see what those wise Internets people had to say about it all, he thought to himself as his eyelids closed… “Yes, the Internets will know”, he murmured. “They know everything…”

Political painter Kaya Mar displays his new artwork “Massacre of the Kurds” as thousands of UK-based Kurds and their supporters marched through Central London to demand that the Turkish government ceases its brutal military attacks on Kurdish people in Northern Kurdistan, Syria and Iraq.

To express his personal outrage at the continuing brutality of Turkish President Erdoğan’s military forces towards this significant section of the Turkish population, Kaya Mar joined the protesters as they gathered outside BBC Broadcasting House in Portland Place to unveil his dramatic, allegorical painting, “Massacre of the Kurds” – a bleak, hellish scene portraying Turkish Army tanks rolling across a blood-drenched plain strewn with the broken, bloodied corpses of Kurdish women, men and children. On either side stretching to the horizon, huge flames engulf what could be the ruined timber frames of buildings, or they could also be crucifixes or a forest of trees.

It is now also known that Turkey has been buying billions of dollars worth of oilstolen by ISIS from oil fields in Northern Syria and Iraq, and in so doing have directly provided ISIS with the financial life-blood it needs to run operations in Syria, Iraq (and now Libya, thanks to the US State Department’s craving to destroy Muamar Gadaffi for having the sheer impertinence to defy Washington and disengage from trading oil in petrodollars – an unforgivable crime against the American Empire).American and Norwegian investigatorshave accused Bilal Erdoğan, son of the Turkish President, of using his maritime company to transport the stolen oil from Turkish ports at Mersin, Dortyol and Ceyhan where it travels directly to Israel from where it is bureaucratically laundered to avoid United Nations sanctions against trading smuggled oil, and is then sold across Europe.

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A little background: Turkey’s 14.7 million ethnic Kurds represent 18% of Turkey’s population, whose struggle for autonomy or a separate Kurdish state started over 200 years ago with the imposition of the Ottoman Empire which robbed the Kurds of their ancestral territories and which heralded frequent violent suppression of Kurds. The Kurdish struggle re-emerged in 1923 with the geopolitical creation of what we know as modern Turkish Republic following the Turkish War of Independence, and escalated in 1978 with the formation of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which still remains the leading resistance force against the Turkish State, despite having been declared a terrorist organisation by the United Nations in a piece of monumentally shabby political kow-towing to Turkish demands, in exchange for allowingUS and NATO military bases and airfields to be established in Turkey as strategic staging posts to assist the USA in its goal of turning the entire Middle East into a pile of glowing ashes.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visits Italy, meeting Italian Prime Minister Matteo Remzi. Many eyebrows were raised (to put it mildly) when it was announced that in order to respect Mr Rouhani’s extreme theocratic, conservative sense of modesty, all works of art featuring nudity at the Capitoline Museum were covered up prior to a sightseeing visit by Rouhani. In direct contrast, when Mr Rouhani went on to France the next day, a planned official dinner with Francois Holland at the Elysée Palace was cancelled after French officials flatly refused to remove wine from the menu…

Driven by his need to comment in a far more reactive, instantaneous way to the deeply disturbing events in Syria, Iraq and especially Turkey where megalomaniac President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – driven by absurd narcissistic fantasies about creating a new Ottoman empire of which he would (of course) be Sultan – is driving his deeply divided country towards civil war at the heart of which is what can only be described as Islamo-fascism and the imposition of a massively corrupt police state which brutalises any resistance, Kaya has diversified into political cartooning.

When Turkish Prime Minister Ahmat Davutoglu visited London on 18th January, Kaya took his two large Erdoğan paintings and set up next to the entrance of Downing Street, across the road from a large, noisy anti-Erdoğan protest. Kaya was quickly approached by two very intimidating Turkish MIT (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı) agents attached to the Turkish embassy who introduced themselves to Kaya and proceeded to try and intimidate him, telling him that if he was in Turkey he would be arrested and would serve at least one and a half years in prison for each painting.

The two secret police agents then complained about Kaya’s presence to armed police officers outside Downing Street, telling them that Kaya’s paintings were an insult to the Turkish President and the Turkish State and that Kaya must be removed immediately. They also repeated the information that what Kaya was doing would be a criminal act in Turkey.

The Metropolitan police promptly told them that they would do no such thing and that because we are in Great Britain, people have freedom of speech and the right to peacefully protest against anything they want. The disgruntled MIT bullies had no choice but to walk away.

So… to commemorate the occasion, here’s a few of Kaya’s latest cartoons:

As the entire country becomes deafened by the relentless drumbeat of David Cameron’s craving to commit the British military to a protracted aerial bombing campaign in Syria, around 4,000 anti-war activists descended on Whitehall to protest against the myopic mind-set that dropping more bombs on a terrified population already living in Hell under the barbaric self-styled Islamic State is going to magically improve their lives.

Members of Parliament have clearly refused to learn the bitter lessons from the futility of British military engagement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and, despite the tide of humanity pouring out of the entire region as desperate people flee their war-torn countries literally by the million into Europe where they are trying to claim sanctuary, David Cameron and undoubtedly a large number of MPs from across all parties – following a disgracefully short 10 hour debate in Parliament tomorrow – look likely to give Cameron the legal fig leaf he so desperately desires so he can strut like an imperial peacock around the halls of the United nations and NATO.

This is against a backdrop of howls of disapproval from many in his own party, the SNP and the more intelligent parts of the Parliamentary Labour Party, who have been joined by a procession of very senior UK and American generals and chiefs of staff who are all saying that this is a sheer folly, yet Cameron keeps his fingers jammed into both ears so he can’t hear the cacophany of alarm.

Kaya brought along three highly pertinent paintings from his collection: A smug-looking Tony Blair wearing only an American flag round his waist stands in a pool of blood, making the ‘V’ sign at the public. A blood-drenched, blind-folded Saudi Prince’s robes fall open to reveal that he is just a midget standing on top of an oil barrel, which in turn sits atop a large pile of bloodied human skulls, and in the third painting “Holland and Cameron – Sons of the Desert”, Francois Hollande wears a Napoleonic hat and gallops theatrically across the desert sands, sitting astride his obedient horse, David Cameron.

The day finally arrived when Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced his much-anticipated Autumn Budget to the House of Commons. The pundits had been wondering through acres of column-inches how he was going to deal with the huge set-back he had suffered following the House of Lords’ rejection of his plans to savagely cut Family Tax credits, forcing Osborne to make a humiliating climb-down.

Kaya had produced a masterpiece for the occasion, titled “The Birth of Gideon”, after Michelangelo’s famous “Birth of Adam”, but portraying the lame-duck Chancellor lounging nonchalantly beside his red Budget Box which contains an axe and a Tax Credits policy paper, reaching out to his idol Margaret Thatcher, who floats on a black cloud, clutching a small tombstone engraved with the epitaph “Poll tax”. For weeks people had been suggesting that cutting Tax Credits for the poorest working families would be Osborne’s cathartic Poll Tax event, wrecking his prospects of taking over from Cameron when he is finally crow-barred out of number 10 to spend more time with his money.

“The birth of Gideon” – 76 x 102cms, oil on canvas

In the end Osborne, the shady tactician, announced that he had “listened carefully to people’s concerns” and that he was scrapping Tax Credit cuts all together, and that he’d also just found £25bn down the back of his sofa because he’s such a brilliant Chancellor so that would pay for it.

The wandering herds of ecstatic Tory back benchers roared and bellowed with approval and delight at all this fantastic validation of all their cruel austerity policies; the sun was going to shine forever on the Conservative Party and the right-wing press had difficulty keeping it in their trousers.

But… after all the crowing and preening had died down and more serious analysts began to unpick Osborne’s statement, it became obvious that once again Osborne had delivered another hand-cart of smoke and mirrors: Tax credits would be completely phased out in two years time anyway because the dreaded, fault-ridden Universal Credit scheme would take over and the working poor would be properly punished then, rather than now, and that mysterious £25bn windfall was only a theoretical tax receipt projection based on a lot of wishful thinking, presuming a growing economy when in fact the economy seems to be slowing down again and our trade deficit is the worst it’s been in many years. All is not quite as rosy as it seems, and now it looks like we’re going to have to pay for another eye-wateringly expensive war in the Middle East, the Tories have agreed to renew Trident for a crippling £176bn, and the emaciated, starved NHS may not make it through the Winter…